Luis Rubio
Stop looking for scapegoats. That reflex—so convenient to a politics of polarization—has run its course. When violence spreads and murders grow more brazen, the issue stops being about guilt. It becomes about survival—and solutions. Mexico’s crisis is not the result of a single bad decision, but rather the culmination of decades of accumulated misjudgments that have unravelled the country’s collective life. The time for blame has passed; the time for reconstruction has come.
Mexico’s fundamental problem is structural. It combines an extraordinarily weak state with a poorly designed and dysfunctional political and administrative system. The result: paralysis, corruption, and failure. Some previous presidents were more competent than others, some more popular—but the overall picture is bleak: a country trapped, divided, stagnant, and at real risk of collapse.
Hanlon’s razor offers a harsh truth: don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity. And stupidity has been abundant. After decades of stable growth in the mid-century, Mexico began to stumble. One government after another reached for quick fixes, never for long-term reform. The 1990s offered a brief glimpse of modernization—reforms, NAFTA—but the institutions built to sustain that progress were fragile. They never anchored in society, and thus were easily dismantled by Morena, brick by brick.
As the economy liberalized, the state began to crumble. The old semi-authoritarian regime may have been undemocratic, but it functioned effectively until it ceased to operate. What replaced it was democracy without capacity: no professional bureaucracy, no clear federal balance, no effective judiciary or Congress capable of checking executive power. Mexico democratized, but it never learned to govern itself effectively. Its security apparatus—federal, state, and local— never developed, thus it collapsed just as organized crime was going global.
Today, the government’s response to the spiral of violence and decay is morning rhetoric—blame, distraction, and slogans. That may play well on television, but it doesn’t solve anything. Polarization is not a strategy; it’s a trap. And once inside it, it can become suicidal.
For years, Washington ceased to attempt to help build a modern country, content so long as Mexico’s chaos stayed south of the border. Now, with Trump’s decision to treat Mexico’s crisis as a U.S. national security threat, the question in D.C. is no longer if America will act, but how.
The assassination of Uruapan’s mayor should serve as a wake-up call—and an opportunity. Mexico’s president can still choose a different path: to build state capacity, to take security seriously, and to involve the United States as a partner, thereby helping to convey sustainability and staying power to this effort. The task is to construct a modern state almost from scratch, after the remnants of the old one have been torn apart. Instead of the “second floor” President Sheinbaum had imagined, she needs to start from the very foundations.
No one holds the monopoly on virtue; everyone bears some share of responsibility. But the burden of action lies with the current government. Blame was the first reaction—and it failed. Then came a more promising plan. But Mexico needs more than a plan. It needs a vision: a new way of understanding the problem, and from there, a way out of the abyss.
@lrubiof
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